Bill Gates still helping known patent trolls obtain more patents

New Gates patent continues his partnership with Intellectual Ventures.

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates is one of 10 inventors named on a newly public patent application for a technology that uses mobile phones to turn text into video. Filed in January 2012, the application was made public on July 25 this year after the customary 18-month confidentiality period.

Gates has been prolific in filing patent applications over the past few years, mostly through a partnership with friends at Intellectual Ventures (IV). That's one of the world's largest patent holding companies, typically described as a patent troll because of its practice of acquiring patents and using them to file lawsuits (notably against Motorola), despite not using the patents to make technology of its own.

Gates's patent filings show that (at least as of 2012) he hasn't slowed down his involvement with IV even as patent trolls are viewed in an increasingly negative light throughout the technology industry. Gates famously criticized technology patents and their impact on the industry in 1991, but he's displayed a much more favorable view of patents since.

Co-inventors on his latest patent application include several people at IV, including patent attorney Alistair Chan; Nathan Myhrvold, former CTO of Microsoft and co-founder of the firm; Edward Jung, another co-founder; and Intellectual Ventures Chief Patent Counsel Clarence ("Casey") Tegreene.

Gates and Myhrvold are listed as co-inventors on 93 patent applications filed since March 2008, according to a search of the US patent database. The 23 newest of these have become public since the beginning of May. (Many of these have duplicate titles, so just seven of those 23 seem to represent unique inventions.)

The former Microsoft CEO also has eight granted patents with Myhrvold and other IV people as co-inventors. All eight were approved between July 3, 2012 and June 11, 2013. The most recent describes a "fluid-surfaced electrode."

The latest patent application and several others are assigned to an entity called Elwha LLC, which has six patents. Five of those patents list either Myhrvold, Chan, Jung, or Tegreene as inventors, and all of them include inventors from IV's hometown of Bellevue, WA.

An IV spokesperson confirmed to Ars that "Elwha LLC is one of the holding companies we use to help maintain our patent portfolio." The latest application with Gates as co-inventor "came from one of the invention sessions held by our in-house invention group, the Invention Science Fund (ISF)," the spokesperson wrote in an e-mail. "ISF is led by Casey Tegreene, who is one of the inventors named on the application. The other people named are either IV employees or affiliated inventors we work with."

Gates has also teamed with IV on a project called Global Good which aims to "invent, develop, and deploy commercially-viable technologies that improve life in developing countries," and TerraPower, which is focused on nuclear energy. We reached out to Gates through the media contact at his foundation today but haven't heard back.

40,000 patents “in active monetization”

IV says it has acquired more than 70,000 patents and patent applications, and that nearly 40,000 are "in active monetization programs," meaning other companies pay for licenses allowing them to use the patent technology without getting sued.

The company has also filed more than 3,000 patent applications from its own "in-house inventions and those generated by our global network of inventors."

IV's brainstorming sessions and Gates's involvement in them have been well known for a few years.

"Bill Gates, whose company, Microsoft, is one of the major investors in Intellectual Ventures, says, 'I can give you 50 examples of ideas they’ve had where, if you take just one of them, you’d have a startup company right there,'" the New Yorker's Malcolm Gladwell wrote in a glowing profile of IV in 2008. "Gates has participated in a number of invention sessions, and, with other members of the Gates Foundation, meets every few months with Myhrvold to brainstorm about things like malaria or HIV."

The brainstorming sessions have obviously led to numerous patent applications, even though IV never makes any products of its own.

As Ars wrote in 2011, "Like all patent trolls, [IV] has been careful not to commercialize any of those inventions. That means that IV is not vulnerable to the threat of retaliatory lawsuits that has helped keep litigation among large technology firms in check."

The latest Gates patent application with his friends at IV envisions a school setting in which students take a picture of text with a phone app that turns it into something more intellectually stimulating:

According to one contemplated scenario, a student is assigned a reading assignment. To make the assignment more interesting, the student may use his or her mobile phone to take a picture of a page of the textbook. The systems and methods described herein may then generate a synthesized image sequence of the action occurring in the text. Thus, rather than simply reading names and dates, the student may see soldiers running across a battlefield. The systems and methods may further gather auxiliary information (e.g., the color of the soldiers' uniforms, the topographical layout of the battlefield, what the generals looked like, time of year, weather conditions, etc.), which may be incorporated into the synthesized image sequences. Presenting the information in a visual, rather than textual, fashion may help to put the information in context and to create cross-references in the student's brain which may help the student to recall the information at a later date. The student may then share one or more files with classmates, enabling them to generate the finished sequences. For example, the student may share his or her finished segments, a model information, a preference file, or other files necessary to generate the image sequence.

Sounds like a pretty good idea. It may or may not end up bringing revenue to IV through licensing deals or lawsuits; but an actual product based on the patent isn't likely to come from the company itself, as it relies on litigation and licensing for essentially all its revenue.

"Rather than make products, we invest in ideas themselves and make them available to other companies (either by selling or licensing the intellectual property) or, as we did with Kymeta and TerraPower, spin out a separate company to commercialize a product or technology," IV told Ars. "It’s premature to say which of those paths this particular invention might take."